Delivery devices employing catheters have been used for medical procedures, including procedures for establishing, re-establishing or maintaining passages, cavities or lumens in vessels, organs or ducts in human and veterinary patients, occlusion of such vessels, delivering medical treatments, and other interventions. For these procedures, it is known to deliver an implant by means of a catheter, often intraluminally.
Use of a guide wire over which an implant deployment device is passed in order to deliver an implant to a location within a patient's vasculature requiring treatment greatly facilitates the delivery process. However, accommodation of a guide wire presents special design problems for other components of an implant delivery system.
One problem with prior art release mechanisms is that they cannot be used in conjunction with a guide wire. Another problem is that known mechanisms for release and retrieval of an implant are complex and thus take up a lot of space within an introducer. This may particularly be a problem where immediate vascular occlusion is desired.